Various printed photo products such as collages often comprise a plurality of images arranged in a pleasing order on the printed output. Photo auto layout solutions, either dynamic layout or predefined layout, often fall short of rendering a pleasing looking product. Often, dynamic and predefined layout algorithms do not arrange the images within the layout in an artistic or pleasing fashion.
Dynamic layout algorithms implemented on desktop computers rarely apply the right steps to produce a layout that enables images to fit together, much like a puzzle, whereby the layout looks pleasing. They typically employ algorithms similar to printed circuit board automatic layout algorithms, and additional layout techniques like image size normalizing, to attain a layout where the images are spread out on a page as evenly as possible. For example, distances between images, and between images and layout borders, are selected to be similar for an even distribution of images in an image space. This often produces a bland looking layout which doesn't take into account the aspect ratio of the image or the resolution of the image. This solution is also often not deterministic but random, thus requiring the customer to request from the computer system a new layout over and over until eventually a pleasing enough layout is generated.
Predefined layout algorithms often do not include enough predefined layouts to cover all the orientation and aspect ratio combinations of images that can be selected by a customer. The resulting layout contains images with differing aspect ratios than the predefined openings provide.
One of the strengths of a template based collage or photobook page layout system is that it can utilize artistically designed layouts which results in very pleasing layouts. An additional goal in creating a pleasing layout is to use all of the image content, i.e. no zooming or cropping.
Template based layout systems have inherent deficiencies. One of the crucial deficiencies is that a very large number of templates are required to handle all the orientation combinations of images with differing aspect ratios, e.g. 4×3, 3×2, 15 7×5, and 16×9 are just a few of the aspect ratios that cameras produce. Customers' images can be cropped without maintaining the original aspect ratio, which compounds the problem even more.
For example, if we were to provide templates for an 8 image collage, we would need enough templates to cover all combinations of landscape versus portrait images. We would need 1 template with 8 landscape openings, 1 template with 8 portrait openings, and another 7 templates covering the 7 different combinations of landscape versus portrait openings. This would require a minimum of 9 templates. This simplistic example only works when all 8 images have the same aspect ratio. When we combine images with different aspect ratios this solution falls short.
If we were to create enough layouts to handle all combinations of landscape versus portrait 4×3 aspect ratio images, and we wanted to ensure we could also provide enough templates for layouts having from 1 to 8 images on a layout, it would require no less than 43 templates. We would need another 43 templates to provide for a different image aspect ratio size.
The real problem exists when images with differing aspect ratios are mixed together on the same layout. The number of additional layouts to cover all of 5 the mixed combinations of images with different aspect ratios in the same layout increases exponentially. A new algorithm is needed to extract the designer's original layout intent within a template and then re-layout the mixed aspect ratio images using the intent of the original layout.